Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

This, to embrace the movements of the tiniest atom—mind in deepest space,

  single formula. Enter (imagine) a truly empty jar: first some thing in it.

  Now, subtract. Sand and root and trickle. I have hundreds of stories to tell. I’d rather

  come at them glancing. It’s one way to be afraid. Once, God had birds’ eyes,

  saw every ultraviolet latch and hook, wheel and paddle. Such intellect

  would know every force that set nature in motion, every address of every furnishing, hold

  the universe entire. Physics: that we might know what God knows. (We might be God.)

  Imagine such a mind—flash of fish turning in light—you have such a mind!

  And all at once: coitus. Seed in pod, unfurl.

  THERE MUST BE

  Consider

  the reversal

  of time: A white match

  regenerated

  by its flame, branches grown into young fresh shoots, and

  consciousness reverted to embryo, an inert

  Newtonian mass—an egg.

  The film, wound all the way back to black, to the rash

  wordlessness of once. We all believed in God then.

  It has since become buried—in the DNA, in seed,

  in carbon’s memory of become-this-tree.

  Such trembling.

  Continental

  plates slip, land unshapes

  itself. Animal

  shapes alter. We need to understand our past, where

  its facts collide. Here was a knife, an old man’s fingers

  moving, an apple peel, a galaxy turning

  like a severe question. Spiral symmetry in

  white luminous arms, newly evolved cilia, worm’s gills,

  fly larvae, butterfly tongues, the gentle

  curl of a

  fern tendril, in

  giraffe intestines,

  chambered nautilus

  (nocturnal roamer of the spiraled coral reef),

  and retracted octopus arms. Music from coiled brass

  instruments enters the ear’s cochlea. Letters

  from ancient alphabets and the cross section of

  a scroll curl to mimic the stars and the genes

  that we came from. I might be autobiographical …

  Centipede,

  in its death, forms

  a truncated swirl.

  As if: completeness.

  But the spiral becomes less circular as it

  grows, though it surrounds a gravitational center.

  Here’s the thing: Spirals never return to their source.

  Expanding universe, things scintillate. I draw

  a diamond, invite rain, tornado, hurricane.

  Someone else builds a great lattice. Her construction stands.

  I begin

  to believe that

  patterns are far less

  persuasive than ice,

  white moonstone, molecules folding themselves into

  thermodynamically stable arrangements, each spruce.

  Listen. Words are what we know.

  Cosmology of instance and particulars.

  Van Gogh loved accidents. He thought there must be a

  God not far off: a gray sky with a band above

  the horizon. A billion chances—and I am here.

  The Face Says Do Not Kill Me

  Miranda Mellis

  Air has no Residence, no Neighbor

  No Ear, no Door

  No Apprehension of Another

  Oh, Happy Air!

  Ethereal Guest at e’en an Outcast’s Pillow—

  in Life’s faint, wailing Inn

  Later than Light thy Consciousness accost me

  Till it depart, conveying Mine—

  —Emily Dickinson

  A broken opening in the wall of a bombed building, by a process of natural magic, becomes the head of havoc; the horrible head of devastation itself, brooding over the ruin that faces a society which cannot control its own destructive impulses. Also, the space becomes reversed—the opening in the wall becoming more solid than the wall itself.

  —Clarence John Laughlin, photographer, on his photograph The Head in the Wall, 1959

  CHAPTER 1

  They slowly rolled along beside it, daughter pushing mother in her chair

  a carving up into the air and down into the rocky soil, staring in one and then the other direction.

  The wall was no metaphor. There was no transferring to another side, another meaning

  No way to pass through

  What the air had become: a barrier

  And what about that other wall, silent owner of supplications

  Her mother called out,

  “Where is the end of it?”

  CHAPTER 2

  The daughters were making their bodies into islands, imagining the world a sea

  Going under ground and becoming worms, crawling under it

  A subtle routine, this imagining of nonhuman elisions, receptive shapes and continuous terrains

  Like water, earth, and air, flora and fauna, nonhuman axes, bats, gazelles, or coral

  As insects they could crawl under, get outside, inside, or as vines

  In a vegetative ecstasy of persistence

  Leaning, falling, pushing, living back

  against the wall.

  CHAPTER 3

  They could crawl

  dry up on it in the desert sun

  It is no figure, no monument, it is there to be breached with prepositions, to climb

  over, under

  To live

  despite

  They sit down under the shade of it

  light a smoke, a light, a smoke

  under the gun

  under the sun.

  CHAPTER 4

  The children concoct dissolution recipes

  Build up and then kick down

  a pretend wall.

  Or lie on their backs with their heads facing opposite directions,

  kicking each other

  breathless

  Until whatever was between them fell away

  On a walk, they find

  signs of abandonment

  some animals pace, others, resigned, slump

  no water

  Only war,

  nor migration corridor.

  An intriguing whorl protrudes

  Digging they

  uproot a broken chair leg mostly buried in sand

  Looking up they

  Throw it as high in the air as they can.

  CHAPTER 5

  They find

  a picture album with broken hinges

  filled with photographs of windows

  through which various people see

  events occurring on the other side

  in the distance

  they have

  intimate and faraway

  looks

  and

  some books

  The Kingdom of This World, by Alejo Carpentier

  Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih

  These they gave their mother

  Who slides into the books like an eel

  As if a book is …

  … a way out

  something real …

  CHAPTER 6

  Wedge of disruption

  jutting up from the dust

  an aerial track

  to the sun.

  In a seated position under the wall

  a dry abrasion in her throat

  she sees a way to

  carve it.

  CHAPTER 7

 
She makes

  one cut after another

  excitedly she strikes

  to make the pieces fall out,

  carving a head,

  a face.

  After the Jump

  Matthew Pitt

  Only when the daughter soothes Seth Snow’s skin does he feel the pressure beneath it. Seth spikes at June’s touch, eyes shut as she works him over. He hasn’t been aware of the twinges, though they’ve been building against him a while.

  Seth’s back is, in June’s ten-year-old opinion, a jagged mess. “And your neck’s a rock pile,” she marvels, briefly patting that area, then going back to the back—trapezius first, next the quarry down his spinal column. Patiently gauging where she’ll do the most good, as Seth grimaces, belly down, atop the garage workbench. It’s the garage of a tool jockey, a man who welds and solders, rivets and planes. In this garage where so much has been built—there’s June’s first field easel, her brother Joyner’s old crib—it’s easy for Seth’s thoughts to unravel, to imagine June’s pounding hands as an excavator’s claw, loosening boulders in his shoulders, bashing chunks of crust into stone, then those into pebbles, those into dust, at first coarse, and later, finer and finer …

  Seth winces, and June stops. “Too hard on you?”

  “Don’t let up,” he responds drowsily. “It all feels like tapping.”

  “Like what?”

  Tapping, Seth repeats, demonstrating on his neck. His words come out softer than they should, reedier, the result of an old viral infection and partial vocal-cord paralysis, which make him sound perpetually parched, as if dust went down his windpipe. Strangers once offered him water when he spoke. These days, they dole out lozenges.

  “Bad week?”

  As June finds a rhythm—sting and lull, sting and lull—Seth considers saying why he’s so tense. Revealing how the trouble that her mom has gotten into may trigger a countdown of their last days together. Only it’s gratifying to not be on edge, to savor the aches breaking. “A bit badder than usual,” he says instead. A hiss rises beyond the driveway. “We better head to the misting. Your brother and mom are waiting. Got your card?” June pats her pocket. Seth gazes through the garage’s grimy window. “Gonna be a full moon tonight.”

  “I know,” June says, dashing dead a no-see-um on her knuckles. “But it’s never full enough to see Dad.”

  A map hangs from the belt-sander hook, one including images of all twelve lunar colonies. This month’s featured colony is the one June’s dad now labors in, an omen Seth wants to ignore, but can’t keep from seeing.

  Subdivision denizens are already lined up around cul-de-sacs. As if waiting for a shuttle, or to be admitted into a show. What they’re waiting for, though, is dusk. Dusk and droplets. For jets of water to curtain their bodies with oscillating streams. As Seth and June race by, Tim, from two doors down, chucks Seth with a porcine fist. “Thought you were gonna miss your dousing, man.”

  “Miss what I live for?”

  The two trade tired grins: The line is one Seth would say at Tim’s liquor store, if he still bought gin from there just before closing. But since booze’s alchemy depends on water, it is hardly an option for anyone anymore. Liquor hasn’t quite been prohibited but is certainly prohibitive. Tim’s costs nearly eclipse his profits. More customers than ever want stiff belts but, thanks to this mess with the moon, fewer can afford them. Liquor, liquor everywhere and not a drop to drink.

  But other, drier vices are still floating up for grabs.

  “They knock off that guy you’re working on yet?”

  Seth shakes his head. “It’s scheduled just after midnight on Monday. Only the president can pardon him now.”

  “When you draw him croaking,” Tim says, “do me a favor. Under his picture, sign ‘Good Riddance.’”

  As Seth and June step close to the sprinklers, beside Sylvia and Joyner, none of the other residents gripe. But make no mistake: Seth’s an interloper. Residents of this subdivision—one of the few that can afford a weekly misting—guard their privilege doggedly. Residents at Seth’s meager apartment complex only get to herd in a barren pool once each season. Stand atop its baking concrete crater as the landlord soaks them with a fire hose. Seth has paid rent there ten years. Works check to check as a courtroom artist for federal cases—a final frontier where film crews cannot tread—sketching hot-button trials, how defendants appear on witness stands once damned by the light of their lies; how aggrieved victims react to judgments.

  This work makes Seth feel like an elevated caricature artist. Viewers expect to see crags of defiance in guilty faces. Heavy lines early in trials, elation later, on the surfaces of innocent skin. You see his pastel sketches inserted in online articles “after the jump.” How we adore comeuppance! It’s worth scrolling or clicking past endless pop-up ads, in order to see the look on son of a bitch X’s face when he learned he’ll pay for what he did. The neighbors wish that kind of comeuppance for Seth. They view him as a moisture moocher. If he weren’t shacking up with the moonnaut’s missus, he couldn’t afford to live here. And if they knew how friendly he’s been with me—his current guilty subject, the most notorious moisture moocher—they’d wish even more comeuppance upon him.

  But Seth’s staying is Sylvia’s call. Even with him in her house, its population remains at its pre-moonseeds quota of four. May be deplorable, what they’re doing, but it’s legal.

  “Dad-B’s back is screwed,” June reports, mist dancing on her fine arm hair.

  “Language, June,” Sylvia responds, but there’s no gravity to her gruffness.

  “Screwed tight is all I mean. God, I wasn’t cursing.”

  “Ease up on your mom,” Seth says, though truth is, he isn’t feeling charitable. He hasn’t spoken to Sylvia all afternoon, not since having to pick up her and her belongings from work. But now the water emerges in a heavier mist—a maze of vapor they’ll all get to briefly lose themselves inside. With the droplets comes relief, a slight springiness, as if this is some supermarket mister writ large, refreshing all the wilted families like bunches of kale or rutabaga. A little mist won’t restore the brown, matted front lawns, but it does restore the homeowners. Beads float over them, catching dusk’s last light: Soon everyone glistens under its wet net, like they’ve donned party clothes. The water’s sweet electric scent eases body odor and curtness, the festive atmosphere betrayed only by nearby policemen standing guard with truncheons.

  Drops cross Sylvia’s and Seth’s faces. Looking her way, he sees the sting of regret in her eyes, the frustration of her tensed brows. “We’ll work it out,” he mouths to her. Sylvia reads his lips and, thankful, draws close, offering her moist lips to his.

  “You two are gross,” Joyner says, a reference to their gentle kiss, not the grime.

  “Your dust’s not coming off,” Sylvia tells Seth. Meaning not general dust from the general day, but powdered pigments from Seth’s soft, fat pastels.

  He wipes a blade of vermilion off his cheek, stubborn smudges of hunter green. “Drawing’s due.”

  “Drawings do what?” Joyner asks, clasping spray in his palm like lightning bugs. “They’re not alive. How can they do anything?”

  Sylvia and Seth giggle over the miscommunication. They laughed this way when they first met, effervescent, easy. Droplets hang before them, held aloft by warm air currents and lack of density. Sylvia playfully waves at the mist, as if dispersing gnats. “Do shoo, dew.” Now the whole family has caught the giggles. Can’t help it. Water seeps into a desiccated head, and the head’s owner gets giddy. Happened in spaceflight, when Sylvia’s spouse broke from earth’s gravity, his body water redistributing to the sinuses, producing puffy light-headedness. Happens to Sylvia after gulping Percocet.

  Seth knows neither sensation.

  The misting continues beyond the usual stop time. Has a water surplus been harvested? No—it’s
the reverse. Forecast calls for major fluid ebb. People need to hunker down for the coming drought, like bears fattening for winter.

  “Are they saying severe?”

  “No, exceptional. Exceptional drought this time.”

  Seth steals a gaze at the marauder moon—cold pearl, robber baron of rivers—as it begins to emerge in the sky, and is grateful. Sure, during the prior planetary exceptional drought, a population equal to that of Louisville, Kentucky, died from dehydration, but he is grateful. Keep drying us up, he thinks. Long as it keeps him up there.

  To think we thought our moon might make a perfect mirror of earth.

  A carnival mirror, in fact. We launched our initial moon transports years ago, their bellies plugged with supplies. Former oil-rig and pipe-line laborers followed, along with skilled contractors, like Sylvia’s husband, and engineers, like me. We’d developed an enzyme meant to generate moisture: We were going to grow water. Early setbacks didn’t tamp our plans, or audacity. Soon as a few safe pockets were secured, wealthy tourists joined us on brief excursions in tiny cabanas, drinking earthrise cocktails, exhuming wallets while our vehicles trod and tromped.

  Science, business, legislative, ecological leaders: We all blazed with belief that colonizing the moon could help ease our crowding resources and swollen membership. So pleased about altering the moon that what the moon might reflect back didn’t enter our thinking.

  Workers like Sylvia’s spouse carved open the moon’s skin. Drilled impacted-basalt basins, plains of volcanic maria, inadvertently carting back home millions of dust flakes from a now-hardened ocean of magma. The dust—inaptly referred to as moonseeds—stuck to uniforms, equipment, adhered to fingers and bodies handling uniforms and equipment, and made its way to water sources on earth. Turned out moonseeds salinize fresh water, impregnate it with crystalline salt deposits. Imagine invasive plants capable of sparking drought. Imagine beach sand clinging to a shoe, reproducing rapidly, leeching more moisture with each germination, reducing some of our largest bodies to withering appendages. Lake Superior? Half-lost. Louisiana wetlands? Bone-dry.

  I voiced early concerns about the dust we dragged back. For saying my piece about earth, I got reassigned to earth; an alarmist Jeremiah. Now I’ve been proven right, but am still a failure; twice over, in fact. First, because I failed to sway skeptics that they had made any error, and later, because I stole from them to rectify the error once they finally copped to it.